Friday, July 12, 2013

Doug LaMalfa's Crocodile Tears for the University of California

It takes a special kind of nerve, or
else an exceptionally under-developed sense of irony, to be Congressman Doug
LaMalfa.In his blog,
Marc Beauchamp pointed out that LaMalfa has already responded to the
announcement of Janet Nepolitano (former Governor of Arizona and current
Homeland Security Secretary) as the University of California’s next
President.

The north state’s representative in
congress opined
that “University of California students can look forward to the same
authoritarian management style Secretary Napolitano brought to the Department
of Homeland Security, hardly a bastion of free speech and open government.While I am pleased to see her leave Homeland
Security, Napolitano’s views are entirely incompatible with the UC system’s
history of civil liberties and the decision to appoint her is perplexing”.

No more perplexing, it must be said,
that LaMalfa’s own sudden embrace of the UC system or of open government and
civil liberties.Let’s remember that our
buffoonish Congressman is proud to march in lock-step with the party of the
Patriot Act, the party which rubber-stamped the war in Iraq, the party which
enthuses about torture and rendition, and the party which assails our
terroristic President for being insufficiently bloodthirsty in his
warmongering.

LaMalfa’s party has sought to repeal
measures of the Voting Rights Act, has a broad, deep vein of misogyny at its
core, and promotes discrimination against people on the basis of their
sexuality.His party has repeatedly
sabotaged efforts to sign up to international human rights treaties which would
hold war criminals in our government to account, and has argued that members of
our national security apparatus who have committed acts of terrorism on par
with those committed by Al Qaeda should walk free.

LaMalfa serves the party of Citizens
United.His party takes both the dime
and the marching orders of the Koch Empire, the financial industry, the energy
lobby, arms companies, and big agriculture—all of those interests which work at
cross purposes to the most essential liberty that citizens can possess: that of
being able to live comfortable lives, characterised by access to institutions,
services, good housing, clean water, safe food, and democratic
institutions.

A civil libertarian with the interests
of the public in mind?That doesn’t
sound like LaMalfa to me.

And although he has been in Congress for
less than a year, LaMalfa has a longer record in state government, where he and
his party used California’s undemocratic supermajority requirements to run our
state into the ground from the minority.The University of California, which he professes to care for, was one of
the foremost victims of the Republican Party’s campaign to sabotage state
government, which consisted of their undermining the ability of state
government to serve the public and then decrying state government’s failure to
do its job.

Thanks to LaMalfa and his party’s caucus
in Sacramento, the University of California costs students twice as much as
when I arrived as an undergraduate in 2004.Course offerings are more restricted, graduation times are longer, more
students are pushed deeper into debt, departments struggle to find the funds to
replace faculty, and whole academic units have been shuttered.

The result is that the University of
California is less accessible to citizens of the Golden State, and particularly
to students from comparatively poorer and more marginalised parts of the
state.In other words, by forcing the
slow privatisation of the University of California, the people LaMalfa has hurt
most are those like his constituents, who benefit less with each passing year
from the collective investment in California’s greatest institution which once
defined our state’s sense of itself as a progressive, open community, always in
the vanguard of the idealism that characterised the California dream.

Now, that dream has been deferred, and
is being dismantled by the political Right across our country.LaMalfa is no friend to his north state
constituents, and certainly no friend of the University of California, and for
him to shed crocodile tears over its travails is hypocritical, and therefore
very much in character for him and his party.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.